InnovEnviro: Online Collaboration

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Collaboration takes place when people come together in a team effort to share and achieve a common goal. No one is excluded. Communication flows. The guiding principle is clear, and as a result, better and more efficient ideas can be collected and selected for implementation.

Collaboration takes place when people come together in a team effort to share and achieve a common goal. No one is excluded. Communication flows. The guiding principle is clear, and as a result, better and more efficient ideas can be collected and selected for implementation.

The same principles apply in an online collaboration concept. Sustainable innovation development can be increasingly and efficiently advanced as more people participate to its growth and implementation. Finally the group effort can result in gaining efficiencies.

It is with this rational that InnovEnviro’s concept was created. It is a collaborative online platform/website, in which promoting and increasing the speed of social and environmental innovation implementation can be achieved through features such as information sharing, generating business models and creating new partnerships, to name a few.

Firstly, the Open Innovation management project’s purpose is to facilitate the global development of sustainable innovation and discussions around them. InnovEnviro should increase communication and participation of its online members for projects, discussions or questions that they share. Further, there is a trend where international companies are participating to environmentally and socially minded projects. They may consider this a part of their corporate social responsibility.

In addition, I have noticed how some companies work on corresponding projects, whilst not having any collaboration or partnerships in place. Is this perhaps due to lack of information sharing? In my opinion, in some instances it would make more sense to collaborate rather than compete. To illustrate this point further, I will mention an example of companies where information sharing, communication and collaboration could assist the efforts of these multinationals, and what they are trying to achieve.

The example I will share involves Interface Inc., a modular carpet manufacturer, and the conservation charity Zoological Society of London (ZSL). They are both working on the Net-Works project, which benefits coastal communities by recycling fishing nets and reusing these into carpet tiles. In parallel I noticed Schnitzer Steel, working with fishermen to recycle nets in cooperation with Covanta, a waste-to-energy company, who recuperate materials for new products and generates energy resulting from recycling. I immediately thought these two separate projects could be linked, and collaboration between these companies could have a greater impact, pool resources and save costs. Innovenviro would enable projects like these to gain exposure, and potentially generate further partners, and in turn increase the impact of the project’s social and environmental benefits.

Therefore, collaboration has many advantages. Knowledge exchange is a powerful tool. Companies should start partnering and collaborating together. In fact, the impact may be greater if other organisations join the effort. Therefore, if others were privy to this information, then who knows who might be interested to partake? A platform is needed where innovative endeavours can be optimized, and awareness increased to improve businesses’ operations for impactful sustainable, social and environmental innovation and outcomes. This is one of the reasons I believe in InnovEnviro’s capability.